The US Secret Service says it is considering disabling iMessage on employees' phones, blaming the app's E2E encryption for the loss of deleted January 6 texts
unless the data retention system was set up to fail in the first place. Our story: https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Will Oremus / @willoremus : Insightful thread from a computer scientist and cryptographer, worth reading as a supplement to our story today: https://twitter.com/... Roger McNamee / @moonalice : Two things to keep in mind: - these people never did the right thing while TFG was president, even when it was easy - this happened after a failed coup Simplest explanation: they destroyed evidence. A coup is sui generis. Requires a sui generis legal and political response. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The Secret Service's move lands in a decade-old fight: Apple and the US government have been at odds over iPhone encryption since iOS 8, and FBI Director Christopher Wray later reported agents couldn't unlock more than half the mobile devices they tried to access — over 6,900 in under a year. Now an agency on the government side of that conflict is blaming iMessage's end-to-end encryption for the loss of deleted January 6 texts, and weighing whether to simply switch the app off.
What makes this notable is the direction of travel: two years later, amid the Salt Typhoon intrusions, US officials would be recommending that Americans use encrypted messaging apps to hide from foreign hackers — the same property the Secret Service treats as a records liability becomes official security guidance. And when agencies try to have it both ways by layering third-party capture onto messaging, the result was the TeleMessage breach that exposed messages from 60+ government users.
First-order effects
- Secret Service employees stand to lose iMessage on their phones if the agency disables it, trading a default consumer app for whatever managed, archivable channel replaces it.
- Apple is pulled back into its long-running confrontation with the government over iPhone encryption — this time not through a law-enforcement access demand but through an internal records dispute inside a protective agency.
Second-order effects
- Agencies that need to retain encrypted messages without disabling them will reach for third-party capture and archiving layers — exactly the structure behind the TeleMessage compromise, which turned a compliance tool into an exfiltration point.
- Other records-bound agencies face the same fork — kill consumer E2E apps on managed devices or build retention tooling around them — shifting procurement toward mobile-device-management and message-capture vendors.
Third-order effects
- The government ends up arguing both sides of the encryption debate — blaming E2E when its own records vanish while endorsing it as defense against foreign hackers — a contradiction that will shape any future access-or-backdoor policy fight.
- If disabling consumer messaging spreads across sensitive roles, official communications bifurcate into locked-down managed devices and personal encrypted apps, making oversight of what was actually said harder, not easier.
The trend: US government agencies are being forced to pick sides on consumer encryption — treating it as a records liability internally even as they recommend it externally against foreign hackers.